A billion years ago, a single-celled eukaryote engulfed a cyanobacterium – an organism capable of converting the sun's energy into food in the form of carbohydrates. In one of the single most pivotal ...

Plastid transformation involves the targeting of foreign genes to the plastid's double-stranded circular DNA genome instead of chromosomal DNA. Plants engineered in this manner offer improved gene ...

Plastid genes in higher plants are transcribed by at least two different RNA polymerases, the plastid-encoded RNA polymerase (PEP), a bacteria-like core enzyme whose subunits are encoded by plastid ...

Chimeric plant materials and variation in their plastomes between green and albino sectors. a, Representative chimeric leaves of the 14 plants with plastome polymorphisms identified in this study. The ...

Early in plastid evolution, many endosymbiont-derived genes were lost (1) and others migrated to the host nuclear genome (2) through a process called endosymbiont gene transfer. Plastid-harboring ...

But two teams have now independently found the first examples of plants whose plastids seem to lack a genome, including a giant rot-scented flower and a group of single-celled algae. Neither case is ...

Abstract Upon imbibition, dry seeds rapidly gain metabolic activity and the switching on of a germination-specific transcriptional programme in the nucleus goes ahead, with the induction of many ...

The plastid genome (plastome) represents an indispensable molecular resource for studying plant phylogeny and evolution. Although plastome size is much smaller than that of nuclear genomes, accurately ...